7 March

Happy Birthday Corn Flakes!

So we are drinking a...

Breakfast Club

On this day in 1897, Doctor John Kellogg, a Seventh Day Adventist, served the world's first cornflakes to patients at his Michigan sanitarium, as part of his idea of a healthy diet.

Some of John's other ideas were, perhaps, a little more left field. He considered masturbation ("self-abuse") "a sin against nature [that] has no parallel except in sodomy", wrote extensively on remedies for the activity, and used his sanitarium as a laboratory to help people live well (i.e. without putting their hands down below).

It was not, however, John who brought cornflakes to the wider world, but his brother Will, who had the genius idea of adding sugar and marketing them as a breakfast food. John sued to stop Will's commercialisation of his health food, but he lost and breakfast has never looked back.

We are raising a glass to William Kellogg with the sort of concoction that would have his brother spinning in his grave, a Breakfast Martini.